"It was able to learn chess, shogi and Go by playing against itself – repeatedly – until each was mastered," the official report explains.

And although AlphaZero is focusing on games for now, the applications for the future go far beyond simply winning a game of chess.

”The hardest challenge in AI is building systems that are ‘general’ which means they can tackle more than one problem,” a Google DeepMind spokesperson told The Sun.

“While humans find this very easy - and can switch from driving a car to cooking a meal to writing an email without effort - AI programs don’t.

”AlphaZero is exciting because it represents a step on the journey to more general systems, which in the long run could help society unlock some of the hardest problems the world faces, from understanding diseases to reducing energy consumption."

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